I moved closer. There was indeed no body, but a bunch of random stuff inside the coffin. It looked like—well, you know how Egyptian pharaohs were buried with all their belongings? It was like that, but the belongings were a weird assortment. They were dirty and falling apart and mostly junk—papers and little jars and bits of fabric and the hilt of a sword with no blade.
“How old is this?” I said, and Round Tom reached in and fished out a liquor bottle. The label was faded and ripped but it was a printed label in a Victorian style. I wondered if Jem or Tessa would have any guess whose stuff it could be.
“You said there was magic here?” I said.
“Dark magic,” Round Tom said gravely. “Wild magic.”
“The curse?” said General Winter.
Round Tom’s expression cleared and he shrugged. “Perhaps not. The magic here is much less demonic than the curse on the house. But emanating from the foot of an unremarkable tree, it called for examination. There are two items that might be of further interest.”
He cleared away a bit of the mess and revealed a very nice scabbard. Sorry, that doesn’t really capture it. A very very nice scabbard. It needed some cleaning up, but it was obviously beautiful and, I’m sure, valuable. It wassteel but covered in gold inlay all over in the shape of leaves and birds. There were runes on it, too, so it had definitely belonged to a Shadowhunter at one point.
“Nice,” I said.
“It is more than ‘nice,’” General Winter said. “It is clearly the work of Lady Melusine herself. See how it has not deteriorated at all?”
Round Tom puffed out his chest. “And yet it is the less interesting of the two pieces,” he said. With a great dramatic gesture he had clearly practiced ahead of time, he pushed all of the junk to one side in the coffin, leaving—
“Is that…a gun?” I said.
“One of those mundane weapons, yes,” said Round Tom. He picked it up as though it might go off, though it was rusty and covered in dirt. It was a revolver. It didn’t look any different than revolvers from a million gangster movies, or Westerns—I guess if I were actually going to send this letter I would have to explain what a Western was.
The big difference was this gun was covered in etchings and runes and words and was obviously magic AF. (Which means… oh, never mind what it means.)
“But Shadowhunters don’t use guns,” I said.
“They never have,” General Winter agreed. He picked up the gun with a surprising amount of familiarity and sighted along it in the direction of a nearby tree. He pulled the trigger and it just clicked—the cylinder didn’t even turn.
“Rusted shut, I expect,” said Tom.
General Winter handed it to me. I’m not good enough with runes to know any of the ones on it. I pointed it at the same tree, kind of as a joke, kind of just to feel how heavy it was, and pulled the trigger myself. There was a hugeBANGand a wood splinters exploded from the tree.
My arm kicked back from the force of the shot. We all stared. My ears were buzzing, but I thought I heard Round Tom say something to General Winter. I’m pretty sure the words First Heir were in there.
Certainly when I looked at Round Tom and General Winter again, their expressions were guarded. Closed.
“Perhaps we should take this item inside and see if the other Nephilim recognize anything about it,” General Winter said flatly.
“I’m sure it just only works for Shadowhunters,” I told General Winter, but he only gave me a troubled look and said nothing. “Anyway. I’ll bring it in.”
I could feel General Winter and Round Tom watching me as I ran across the lawn and into the house. Jem and Tessa were sitting on a couch in the drawing room, watching Mina coloring on butcher paper with crayons.
The moment I came in holding the gun both of them looked utterly shocked. Tessa got to her feet and moved between me and Mina. I know she was standing between the gun and Mina, but it still felt rotten.
“What—” said Jem, standing up, but he didn’t finish the sentence. He just stared at me, and the gun.
“Round Tom found it in the garden,” I said. “Is this a gun for Shadowhunters?” I could feel my voice getting tighter. “Shadowhunters don’t use guns.”
“Long ago, Christopher Lightwood tried to create a gun Shadowhunters could fire,” said Tessa. She was still staring at the gun.
“It was in a coffin,” I said. “With a bunch of other stuff. A broken sword, and a fancy scabbard.”
“I wondered what he did with it,” said Jem. He and Tessa exchanged a look. “The gun belonged to my son James,” she said. I felt sick. Tessa hardly ever talked about her children from that time. “He was the only one who could use it. It wouldn’t fire in anyone’s hands but his.”
“I fired it,” I said.
They both looked stunned, and not in a good way.
